.com Review After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Slowness comes as a surprise: it is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, with, as the author himself says, "not a single serious word in it." Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, sperated by more than two-hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic, finally culminating in poignant cross-century encounter sure to linger in the reader's mind Despite Kundera's disclaimer about the novel's seriousness, Slowness resonates with a profound meditation on contemporary life, the secret bond between slowness and memory, the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. Read more From Publishers Weekly Kundera's latest (after Immortality) is a scintillating jeu d'esprit, as coolly elegant and casually brutal as the 18th-century French arts to which the text pays tribute. Indeed, this is the expatriate Czech author's first novel written in French, his adopted homeland's native tongue. The paintings of Fragonard and Watteau, Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses and an obscure novella entitled Point de lendemain, by Vivant Denon, are all invoked by the narrator, who may be Kundera himself (his wife calls him "Milanku"). He recalls the plot of Point de lendemain while visiting a chateau-turned-hotel, admiring the leisurely hedonism implicit in both these relics of a bygone age. "Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?" the narrator asks as he considers the frantic, joyless pursuit of stimulation that modern men and women call pleasure. He remembers-or perhaps invents-a group of French intellectuals determined to demonstrate their political correctness as a means of furthering their ambitions. "Dancers," he calls them, discerning that they are more concerned with displaying their moral purity than with accomplishing anything. The political and sexual maneuverings of these contemporary characters intermingle with the narrator's musings and ongoing retelling of Point de lendemain; in a brilliant and oddly moving finale, the protagonist of the 18th-century novella comes face to face with his present-day counterpart, Vincent, who is incapable of slowing down long enough to appreciate the meaning of the experiences he has just undergone. A deliberate chilliness of tone and the one-dimensionality of Vincent and his peers keep this from being as emotionally engaging as it is intellectually stimulating. Nonetheless, it embodies provocative thoughts on personal and social triviality from a postmodern master. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo. (May) FYI: Also in May, HarperPerennial is issuing a new translation of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Aaron Asher, Kundera's longtime editor and publisher, and husband of Linda Ashe. The translation incorporates revisions made by Kundera in the mid-1980s.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
D**D
Kundera is a solid intellectual
If you are amused by thought and thinking then the works of Milan Kundera are for you. All the stuff that is flowing through your mind in observing the world turns up on the pages of his novels. I especially enjoyed "Slowness" in its discussion of how people with quiet voices have trouble fitting into social situations with all those loud voices dominating. Yes, it hits close to home.
E**N
Kundera, not dead yet
Juxtaposed several time periods--you gotta stay with Kundera in this book, and it stands up batter than more recent efforts. Still, not sensational.
M**N
Disappointing
it's funny how things that make such an impression on you when you're young can be fairly unimpressive when you are older. I still found the book to be a good read, but it seemed a bit crude.
S**L
Slowness delivers quickly
If you like Kundera, you will l like this short read
D**N
Five Stars
good read.
W**Y
Worst Kundera Book Ever
I've read plenty of Kundera's books, and this is the worst ever. I bet he had a file of half formed ideas that didn't make it into Unbearable Ligjtness of Being (his best book), and then he twisted other ideas from ULB so that they sounded halfway original. Nearly all the characters here are amalgamations of characters in ULB, just less developed. The font is so large that if this were printed normally, it would only be 100 pages, hardly long enough to be a novel. Instead of the subtle second person narration of ULB, here K. is just simply the narrator--a lazy crutch, not to mention an arrogant one. I had stopped reading Kundera because his anti-feminism and objectification of women (also present here) grew tedious, but I had to read this for book club.
J**A
An Essay on Memory, Forgetting and Speed
I was expecting a novel but this book is as much an essay or a work of philosophy given a bit of plot to move it along. It blends two stories of seduction in totally different time frames, one modern, one historic, with twists of irony and comedy. (The blurbs say two ‘love’ stories but I don’t’ agree that a male professor struggling to pick up a female grad student at an academic conference is a love story. lol) The historic romance is that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, which the author considers to be one of the greatest novels of all time.The main theme, reflected in the title, and illustrated by the story in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, is this: “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting…the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” The pure pursuit of pleasure, hedonism, lacks the slowness.Another theme is “who is the audience?” For the dancer “He’s showing off not for you or for me but for the whole world…An infinity with no faces! An abstraction.”The infinity with no faces has also been generated by photography. Kundera states that the nature of fame became a different thing before and after photography. He wrote this book in 1995 so I think we can expand ‘photography’ to mean mass media. Photography and, by extension, mass media, create a “worshipful fixation on famous people” and a famous person comes to “…see himself as elect [which] serves public notice on both his membership in the extraordinary and his distance from the ordinary, which is to say …from the neighbors, the colleagues, the partners, with whom he (or she) is obliged to live.”To illustrate this theme of fame, part of the story focuses on an academic Superstar in the tiny, creepy crawly world of entomology. He denigrates his academic rivals.These themes of hedonism and speed come to a head in a culminating scene where the professor and the grad student have sex by the hotel pool. The audience becomes not each other but the abstraction of the audience with no faces. The actual act is a disaster. Since “…our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed,” after the debacle the professor straps on his helmet and speeds away on his motorcycle.A couple of other passages I liked:“The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.”“He understands that that impatience to speak is also an implacable uninterest in listening.”
J**D
The Bookschlepper Recommends
Slowness: a Novel by Milan Kundera: This is a novel with an essay hidden inside, an essay on the speed of modern life and romance. The narrator is joined by an 18th century Chevalier and Vincent, a woebegone hanger-on of the smart-set and a passel of entomologists. An intricate weaving of old and new; acerbic observations; interesting conclusion. The second reading is better.Quotes: "The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear. Because the source of fear is in the future; and a person freed of the future ha nothing to fear. Speed is the form of ecstasy the technological revolution has bestowed on man.""Pleasure is the absence of suffering. Suffering, then, is the fundamental notion of hedonism: one is happy to the degree that one can avoid suffering, and since pleasures often bring more unhappiness than happiness, Epicurus advises only such pleasures as are prudent and modest.""There was one kind of fame before the invention of photography, and another kind thereafter. The Czech king Wenceslaus, in the fourteenth century, liked to visit the Prague inns and chat incognito with the common folk. He had power, fame, liberty. Prince Charles of England has no power, no freedom, but enormous fame.""The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven's one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each. If the same concert were given again in ten years, only the first note of each piece would be played, thus one hundred thirty-eight notes for the whole concert, presented as one continuous melody. And in twenty years, the whole of Beethoven's music would be summed up in a single very long buzzing tone, like the endless sound he heard on the first day of his deafness."
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